Carl,
This post of yours deserves to be read by every budding NT scholar
in the world--and by those who budded long ago as well. You are of course
100% right (which always means, "I agree with you"!". Thanks for saying it
today!

Edward
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It is a fact of profound importance that the NT, despite those elements
within some of its documents that clearly show forth concepts and speech
elements deriving from a Jewish milieu (and that milieu is not distinctly a
Palestinian Jewish milieu so much as a Diaspora Jewish milieu), survives
100% in Greek. The primitive Christianity that shaped the NT corpus so
quickly transcended Jewish ethnic boundaries and became an international
movement that we must attribute the bulk of the composition of the NT
documents to Gentile Christian writers. I'm inclined to think that even
Paul, so far as the Greek he spoke and wrote is concerned, should be
understood fundamentally within this Gentile Christian linguistic sphere
rather than in any sort of distinctly "Semitic" kind of Koine dialect.